The small village of Pine Hall was full of history buffs on Saturday, October 18. About 40 people from Stokes County and beyond gathered at Pine Hall Presbyterian Church at 9 a.m. to begin a seven-hour tour of historic places in and around Pine Hall. This was the third annual Stokes County Historical Society Tour.

The first session was led by Jim Wilkes and John “Skip” Smith, native Stokes County men who are experts on the Saura Indians. As they lectured and took questions from the audience, Wilkes and Smith displayed their extensive collections of Indian artifacts, including a Clovis fluted-point, carved stone, possibly 13,000 years old, found on Oldtown Road in Walnut Cove.

The Saura seminar included explanations of the three major Saura settlements in the area, how the Siouxan tribe migrated from Ohio, head flattening techniques practiced on Saura babies, typical village life on the Dan River and the eventual Saura migration out of the area. Some in the audience were surprised to learn that the immediate region was once populated by buffalo, black panthers and even elk.

Part two of the tour took the group to Pine Hall plantation, the namesake of the town, just across from Pine Hall Elementary School. Charlie Rodenbaugh was the resident expert who taught this session. The group visited the rambling brick house built from 1853-1855 and now owned by the Dixon family who are attempting to restore it to its antebellum grandeur.

In pre-Civil War days, the plantation consisted of 750-1,000 acres and was run by Major Leonard Anderson and his slaves, which probably numbered about 30. The prevailing thought was that Anderson built the grand house “to make a Virginia belle happy.” His wife was a former Fontaine, a descendant of Patrick Henry and part of one of the “First Families of Virginia.”

Today one of the original slave cabins still stands, as well as an old building that was the official corn commissary for the area during the Civil War.

The tourists then loaded back onto the two vans, one provided by YVEDDI and the other by Pine Hall Baptist Church, to travel down Pole Bridge Road to the old Pole Bridge School. The school had originally been built for the whites a short distance to the north in 1904. When they got a new school, the old building was given to the blacks in 1910. It took horses three days to pull it just a short distance.

From 1915-1952, blacks in the Pine Hall area attended the school, which served grades 1-8. Bernard Hairston told of a man who finished school there at the age of 28 so that he could get a higher education in Winston-Salem.

Betty Scales, 88, explained to the rapt audience what her school days were like in the Pole Bridge School—how the boys would arrive early to build fires, how they all drank from the same water dipper, how the ones who brought bologna for lunch were envied by the other students.

Hairston and others have been part of an effort to restore the school and hope to complete the project in the future. Already they have hung a wooden plaque on the back wall that reads, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a replica of one that hung there many years ago.

After a lunch provided by Artist’s Way of Danbury, the tour continued with a visit inside the Pine Hall Presbyterian Church, built by the Dalton Family in 1899. The Blackwell family, who actually began the church in their home prior to 1870, first donated 1/2 acre for the burial ground and church, later giving another 14 acres. In the church today sits a handmade wooden pulpit and communion table made by Lenzie Mabe of Sandy Ridge in 1944.

Another historic church was the next stop on the tour. Davis Chapel, off Dodgetown Road near the Meadows community, is one of the oldest churches in Stokes County. It was built in 1880, burned in 1922 and was reconstructed according to the original plan in 1924. Debbie Dunlap Cummings, president of the Davis Chapel Historic Association, Inc., spoke to the crowd about the Chapel.

The church actually began on the James Davis plantation in the 1700s as blacks and whites worshipped together in the Davis home. Later a camp meeting ground was set up to allow for more room. Some of the families who attended the camp meetings began to make plans for an actual church building, which led to the construction of the actual Davis Chapel.

Today services are only held twice a year in the Chapel, in the spring and the fall. A Christmas program, a more recent addition, is in the works again for this year. The quaint white church can be rented out for weddings or other special occasions.

The final stop on the tour was the Captain Charles McAnally house just up the road from Davis Chapel. The house, built probably around 1785, has been fully restored by Gareath and Ann Meadows who worked for two years on the project with painstaking attention to detail.

As tour participants arrived at the former McAnally plantation, they were greeted by the Meadows’ who were dressed in garb from the 18th century. Roaring fires welcomed the chilled visitors. Stokes County Historical Society President Charles Farlow, along with the Meadows’ themselves, spoke about the prestigious McAnally family who established the sprawling plantation.

Earlier, Farlow had expressed his gratitude to two prime organizers of the tour, Linda Hicks and Patti Dunlap, both of whom were also costumed in historic garb. He invited everyone to the next meeting of the historical society on Sunday, November 16, at the Danbury Public Library where Steve Shelton is scheduled to speak on Vade Mecum Springs.